Security researchers estimate that the majority of malicious software (“malware”) generated today is deployed and/or proliferated via the Internet. In recent years, malware developers have attempted to avoid detection by hosting malware on websites that only remain active for a short period of time or by posting links to such sites on legitimate websites. Because many existing computing-security technologies detect malicious websites by (1) statically scanning the contents of a suspicious website, (2) determining that the content hosted by the website is malicious, and then (3) generating a unique digital signature or fingerprint for the website and/or content for use in later identifying the website and/or content (a technique known as blacklisting), conventional computing-security technologies have struggled to protect computing resources from such attacks due to their inability to quickly and correctly create digital signatures for each of the thousands or potentially millions of variations of new websites or content generated daily by malware developers.
Due to these limitations, some security-software vendors have turned to whitelisting technologies. In a whitelisting system, computing systems may only access websites identified on a preapproved whitelist. Security-software vendors may create whitelists either manually or automatically, such as through the use of web-spidering techniques. However, given the high number of new websites and files created and published on a daily basis, many security-software vendors have struggled with manually creating comprehensive website whitelists. Moreover, many automatic techniques for creating whitelists only identify a portion of known legitimate websites. Conventional automatic techniques are also prone to falsely identifying illegitimate websites as legitimate, and vice-versa, further limiting the viability of a whitelist generated using such a technique. As such, the instant disclosure identifies a need for improved systems and methods for identifying malicious websites.